Thursday, 18 June 2015

Award-winning
performer and culture producer Bikiya Graham-Douglas performed Wait at Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin,
Ireland, to give a voice to African women and restate the importance of
education, as a defining index of women empowerment

When Nigerian actress and culture
advocate Bikiya Graham-Douglas left the country weeks back to perform an
eclectic piece on the potential of the African woman at this year’s African
Week in Dublin, Ireland, United Kingdom. it was with high hopes. Now,
Graham-Douglas is back and thoroughly excited at her performance that put
African women in proper perspectives.

The
African Week is organised by Irish Aid, an Irish Government shuttle diplomacy
programme held in association with African Ambassadors, to celebrate Africa and
interactions for trade and commerce with a view to strengthening relationships
between the Republic of Ireland and Africa. Graham-Douglas performed Wait, a piece written by Dipo Agboluaje,
who is also the writer for the classic African narrative Obele and the Storyteller, which was recently performed in Port
Harcourt at the closing ceremony of UNESCO Port Harcourt World Book Capital
2014.

Graham-Douglas,
who is the founder of Beeta Universal Arts Foundation, expressed satisfaction
at the honour accorded her, as she was also selected as ambassador. She brimmed
with excitement before she left for the show. She’d expressed how honoured she
was to be chosen to showcase the resourcefulness of the African woman to such a
distinguished event. She said it was an opportunity for the African woman to
shine and tell her own story in her own unique ways to the world.

According to her, “I’m performing a piece about the African woman. It’s
a piece about the empowerment of the African woman and it will be held at Samuel
Beckett Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin. I’m very excited and nervous about
it. The story of the African woman is about having freedom to be herself, to
have education, the right to be free from violence, and her right to be heard.
Her story is about how she could recognize her capacity to perform and not just
her capacity as a woman performing the usual stereotypical woman’s duties
society ascribes to her.

“There are woman who are educated and highly experienced, but they are
not seen beyond being a woman. If she is given a voice and allowed to succeed,
she will affect her community and it will trickle down to her environment. It’s
taken for granted how powerful a woman can be. The saying, ‘educate a woman and
you educate an entire community is a truism’. I’m really excited to be able to
contribute to the growth of the African woman and to perform at the African
Week in Dublin”.

During
the week in Lagos, Graham-Douglas said Wait,
which she performed in Dublin “focused on the empowerment of the African woman;
it highlights the importance of education to the African woman. I must tell you
it well really well; it was well received. After the event, it became the trend
on social media and the watchword became ‘I will not wait; I will walk into my
future,’ which is a line taken from the monologue”.

Her
film Flower Girl also had a private
screening at the event to the delight of the ambassadors in attendance.

Graham-Douglas
also took time to speak on her other projects, a new film she just made, a
performance in the offing and a playwriting competition. She also affirmed how
rooted her love for the theatre is in spite of the occasional pull from the
filmic sub-genre of the performance art. Lunchtime
Heroes is the new movie she just made, which is yet to be out; it’s a film
devoted to the talents and ability of children where she canvases helping them
to develop in whichever direction their talent takes them.

“Lunchtime Heroes is a film I
just did with Seye Babatope,” she said. “In the training for theatre you equip
yourself with techniques and skills to perform and experiment with different
forms. Film and theatre resonate with people differently. I’m happy to be a
part of film and theatre. I enjoy film but I get an explosion on stage; there’s
a satisfaction that comes from stage, a satisfaction you get with the live audience
that is absent in film. With theatre it’s a powerful connection one has with
the audience – they laugh, cry and hate with you in the interaction on stage
that’s absent in film”.

Also,
Graham-Douglas is looking to giving a bigger performance of Obele and the Storyteller at Easter next
year. However, her next project is a playwriting competition with which she
hopes to expose and empower young playwrights in the country. The best scripts
will be performed at a grand event sometime in September.

Denja Abdullahi
is a culture worker and writer, who has held many executive positions in
Nigeria’s writers’ body, Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) in almost a
decade. Currently the Vice President of the association, Abdullahi is eyeing
the first position of the union and asserts, “To me, arts and literary
administration is not a hobby or sidekick; it is a career, which must be
managed with all indices of professionalism”. In this interview, he spoke to
Anote AJELUOROU about his ambition and how he intends to reposition ANA for
competitiveness and as a world-class organisation. Excerpts:

What are your plans for repositioning ANA?

I intend to galvanize the talents, expertise
and different pockets of competence the association is blessed with in its
membership to reposition it. In my long period of service to the association, I
have discovered that you can only achieve anything significant, in the midst of
perennial paucity of funds, by leveraging and harnessing the potentials in
members and other lovers of literature for identified aims and objectives. I
will also create working synergy between ANA and other associations and bodies
in the creative sector to fight for common goals that will improve the lot of
the sector such as ensuring the establishment of the National Endowment Funds
for the Arts and the like. I will internationalize the operations of the associations
and stake its claim in the scheme of governance in Nigeria. My manifesto is
long on what I will do to reposition ANA if elected but these are just a few of
them and they are all translated into pockets of programmes, projects and
activities.

ANA has since lost its voice in the national space.
Will you help reclaim it under your watch?

I do not think it is completely right to say that ANA
has lost its voice in the national space. The association has a dynamics that
is different from some other associations that jump all the time into public
discourse. The association has to be true to its founding ideals, spirit and
inherent character. Writers by nature must exhibit some objective distance from
what is happening around them so that they can review same and make appropriate
interventions when necessary. The association is essentially a craft union,
established to promote the interests of its members while participating in the
building and maintenance of an egalitarian society. Much of these tasks are
done without much media noise and that is why it can easily be assumed that the
association is lost in the public space.

Also, different times call for different
approaches in the way the public space should be engaged. During the military
era, you will recall that the association played an activist part along with
other groups till democracy was won. During the various times our democracy was
to be derailed, particularly in the period of the third term debacle, I
remember signing a public document as General Secretary, on behalf of the association,
rejecting that anomaly. We have at various points added our voices to the call
for rectitude, propriety, constitutionality and common sense in the governance
of our land. I will maintain all these under my watch and even improve on
making the association more relevant to the society and in public discourse. I
will give a strong voice to the association without making that voice sound
pedestrian.

ANA Prizes don’t seem attractive anymore with The Nigeria
Prize (USD$100,000) for Literature sponsored by Nigeria Liquified Natural Gas
Ltd and Etisalat Prize for (African) Literature (15,000) that give out c ash
prizes in U.S. dollars and pound British sterling. Will you overhaul ANA prizes
for more competitiveness?

What
many people do not know is that ANA prizes, right from inception, have a developmental
philosophy governing them. ANA prizes were instituted originally to announce
new writers and new voices into the public space; it is to sort of groom
talents for later literary greatness. If you study and review the history of
the prizes you will see that many who won the prizes years back later went on
to win other glamorous literary prizes at home and abroad, sometimes with the
same books or with other books. ANA prizes were designed to build confidence in
writers and boost their literary careers.

However, I agree that the ANA prizes have lost their shine, first with
their abandonment by those who endowed them such as Cadbury’s, Chevron, NDDC,
Literamed, Spectrum, etc, due to a myriad of economic reasons, and second, with
the coming of mega prizes such as The Nigeria Prize for Literature, Caine Prize
and Etisalat Prize for Literature. I was at the head of a team instituted by
the present ANA National Executive to review the prizes and suggest possible
ways of overhauling them. The team recommended the streamlining of the prizes,
knocking off those that have outlived their usefulness and those whose
administration have become difficult due to sponsors’ disinterest and fatigue.
These recommendations were upheld and implemented and we now have fewer prizes
we are managing very well. I intend, under my watch, to review further the administration of ANA literary prizes with a view
to beefing up their profiles as well as seek the establishment of new prizes
that will be developmental and sustainable. We must attract back to the prizes
big sponsors and shore them up to achieve their purposes for the winners and
the sponsors. ANA as a body has the expertise for literary prize administration
in Nigeria more than any other group having been in the business for over three
decades.

ANA land in Abuja seems in limbo after a lengthy litigation. How do
you plan to convert the land into a proper asset so as to reduce dependence of
ANA conventions on government patronage?

ANA is gradually waking up from its slumber.
We have won the court case on the land since 2012 and paid the necessary
damages due to a developer whose intent was to hold us hostage to his lack of
capacity. We have a new agency on the land that has helped us fight off vicious
trespassers, encroachers and land grabbers. Preliminary infrastructure is being
laid on the land on a very challenging topography. Under my watch, I will
ensure there will be no deviation from the original plan for the land to be a
writers’ resort with layers of facilities that will house important edifices
and generate income for the association. I will also ensure a business model is
adopted for the development of the land and the running of its facilities so
that the association will derive from it, at least 50% of its running cost,
while the remaining 50% is sourced from membership dues and sponsors for
necessary programmes and projects.

But beyond the rituals of conventions, how do you propose ANA should engage
writers more in your tenure?

I intend
to unbundle the annual international convention of the association and
repackage it to make it more of a writers’ affair where books, authors and
creativity will be fully celebrated. We will pull out some activities within
the annual convention to stand on their own as full-fledged events within the
year. That will increase our visibility all year round. We will also intensify
efforts towards holding developmental literary workshops and schools outreach
programmes, including tertiary institutions, celebrating landmark literary events
and authors with colloquia, international literary exchange programmes,
supporting residencies and generally raising the profile of literary
activities.

The babble of voices on the
socio-political space sometimes makes it difficult to sift through properly and
winnow out the best and practicable views that best suit Nigeria’s intractable
problems. This is further compounded by policymakers who fit World Bank and
International Monetary Fund-induced solutions to every situation and
circumstance in far removed and alien soil like Nigeria. Prof. Steve Azaiki’s Thoughts on Nigeria: Speeches, Letters and
Essays (Associated Book-makers Nigeria Ltd, 2014) falls into the category
of seminal distillations that are often ignored by Nigeria’s policymakers at
the peril of development. It’s why, in spite of abundance of intellectual input
to socio-political conundrums, the problems still persist, perhaps, that way,
too, those who profit from the problems continue to feed fat on the misery of
the majority.

The
saying ‘do not judge a book by its cover’ is also true for Azaiki’s book. The
author’s photograph on the cover, on a book that is not an autobiography,
wrongly sets it out as one of those ego-massaging, self-glorifying tomes by
Nigeria’s politicians likely to gather dust in private libraries soon after the
fanfare of a launch. But Azaiki is no ordinary politician; he’s an academic
that brings a whole measure of intellectual savvy to the governance table.
Having served as Secretary to the State Government under Governor Diepreye
Alamieyeseigha in Bayelsa State, Azaiki is eminently in a position to make
qualified pronouncements regarding Nigeria’s leadership problems and offer
modest suggestions on the way forward. But also, questions of his stewardship
will also be asked: Is he speaking from hindsight of what might have been done?
What did he and the government he served do to resolve some of these problems
he is now exposing? Having also served during former President Goodluck
Jonathan’s tenure as deputy governor, couldn’t he have put in a word or two to
help stem the drift that assailed the country’s recently political history,
especially the reverses that he contends National Economic Empowerment and
Development Strategy (NEEDS) represent for the people of the Niger Delta and
other low income, excluded areas?

These
are some of the observable issues that arise from Azaiki’s postulations in his seminally
researched essays and speeches that have the endorsement of former President
Shehu Shagari, who wrote the forward to the book. These essays and speeches are
clearly beyond the drill of some of the workaday run of politicians striding
the land. Indeed, Azaiki is probably not writing for now, when democracy equals
how much a politician can grab for his pocket while the majority wallows in
abject poverty. This is why the emergence of an a properly educated crop of
Nigerians that understand what development means and how it can be deployed to
best serve the interests of segments of the Nigerians in their diverse
sociological backgrounds is an imperative for the author. This postulation is
at the heart of Azaiki’s Thoughts on
Nigeria.

The
book is divided into four parts although the themes or topics necessarily
dovetail into one another, with a concern for the peculiar problems of minority
Niger Delta inexorably confounded by oil politics. The first part is ‘On
Governance and Politics’, with a telling first chapter on oil and gas and the
leadership opportunity available for Nigeria. Sadly, Nigeria has repeatedly
failed to cash in on such opportunities at the global level because the country
fails to address inequities at home, what with the criminal neglect of
oil-bearing communities both by the federal Government and the oil companies.
The same neglect, Azaiki argues, attends Nigeria’s inability to diversify the
economy with revenues from oil wealth, with the result that unemployment
remains unacceptably high. The oil companies have their head offices in Lagos,
a situation that necessarily denies Niger Delta youth employment opportunities
in the oil exploited on their land.

According to the author, “We, as a major oil exporting nation, must use
our oil to diversify exports and invest the bonanza in better roads and
seaports, invest in education, manpower training, technology transfer and
health services… We as a nation must address inequities in Nigerian politics.
Oloibiri in Bayelsa State, where oil was first discovered in 1956-1958 must be
indelibly etched within Nigeria’s consciousness, and not left barren as an
after-thought of yesteryears”.

This
essay was written during the Olusegun Obasanjo era. But clearly neither
Obasanjo nor Jonathan heeded this sound advice. Even the road to Obasanjo’s Ota
or the East-West Road to Jonathan’s Bayelsa was made during their tenures. The
seaports of Warri, Port Harcourt, Calabar and Onne remain ghost ports under
Jonathan. There’s, therefore, disconnect in scholarly postulations or advice
and the realities of development in the land, a situation that has hobbled and
stunted the country’s growth.

Azaiki’s
is a man of patriotic fervour; for him, being in government is not the only way
to serve his fatherland. Having left office, he set up the National Think Tank of
like-minded Nigerians to help formulate policies for governments both at state
and federal levels. In setting up the National Think Tank, Azaiki argues,
“Given our political and economic antecedents and status in the comity of
developing nations, we believe that the time has come for Nigeria to take its
rightful position in world affairs. As one of the fastest growing, developing
nations, Nigeria is expected to show leadership in the delivery of public
service. We have, therefore, found it highly important that, in order to
achieve good public governance, several factors come to play. Bearing these in
mind, this Think Tank will provide a basis for analyzing the areas of success
or failures of public governance in Nigeria and proffer credible solutions to
the country’s myriad of socio-economic and political problems...”

The professor of Agriculture also writes on other issues of development
and governance, especially as happened in recent collective memory. Such issues
as Boko Haram, rash of impeachments,
the sort that saw his former boss, Alamieyeseigha out of office in what he
describes as strange circumstances akin to political witch-hunting, corruption,
Bayelsa State under Sen. Seriake Dickson and a host of others.

‘On Niger Delta’ makes up part two of Azaiki’s Thoughts on Nigeria in which he devotes a lot of intellectual
energy on issues plaguing the region that effectively feeds Nigeria, but which
still has nothing to show for this economic bleeding that leaves a region and
its people in bewildering abject poverty. Here, Azaiki argues that government’s
developmental efforts through such policy as NEEDS have done far worse to
deepen poverty rather than alleviate it. Apart from the physical poverty
charactersised by the inability of the people to live well, as a result of
polluted waterways and farmlands that starve them of their livelihood, Azaiki
also points out a more deadly kind of poverty – educational poverty, which he
says will keep the region’s coming generation perpetually poor and in
disadvantage with their peers from other parts of the country.

The author argues that the rash of privatization and commercialization of
government’s utilities, including the all-important social service like
education, has devalued education currently offered in public schools. As a
result, government now fails to budget adequately for education, which is
contracted out to the highest bidder. This shortfall in educational budgeting will
mean that the poor, a condition in perpetuity among the marginalized majority
of Niger Delta citizens, cannot afford quality education for their children, as
the oil resources of the region go to finance educational projects in other
parts of Nigerian. This leaves them in the throes of poorly equipped schools
and trained teachers, as local and state governments increasingly find it hard
to cater for the huge educational needs of the region. This approach, which the
author calls macroeconomic management of development that does not take into
account the peculiar needs of special areas that are already at a disadvantage
for which the Niger Delta falls compounds the problems of the region. This is
moreso when the region is denied full benefit of its oil wealth, a policy that
excludes majority of the Niger Delta poor.

As Azaiki states, “Under this framework, government has a purely
regulatory role as education at all levels is now a commodity. As a result,
NEEDS has deeply impacted the right to free, equal, and high quality education
thereby excluding some citizens from participating in growing the economy and
denying them from being integrated in a meaningful way in the long-run… the
narrow mechanism of NEEDS as inadequate for the scale of a problem which
requires broad-based measures…”

With part three as ‘Tributes’ and part four is ‘On International/Contemporary
Issues’ that are dear to the author’s heart, Azaiki’s book effectively plumbs
the depths of some of the problems plaguing the country. This is a book for now
and the future that will help direct the course of good governance that has
been lacking in Nigeria’s democracy since 1999. With President Muhammadu
Buhari’s ‘Change’ mantra and his promise to feed school children every day, the
first step would be to rethink NEEDS and its anti-poor stance in commoditizing
education in line with Azaiki’s conception. Clearly, Azaiki’s former boss,
Jonathan missed the road on NEEDS with regard to the Niger Delta.

Indeed, governors in the region will do well to read this book and
redirect their thinking caps for better performance. Azaiki’s intellect shines
through in this commendable work of dispassionate political rendering.

Tuesday, 2 June 2015

LAST week, scholars, academics and
friends gathered at Trenchard Hall of University if Ibadan in the maiden
edition of The Niyi Osundare Poetry Festival 2015. Organisers had said Prof.
Niyi Osundare is a global literary icon, whose poetry is both topical and
polemic and on the side of the suffering masses and visionary as it navigates a
refreshing literary course that benefits from in his folk Yoruba tradition.

At the symposium that followed, Diala presented the lead paper titled
‘Topicality and the Visionary Artist: Preliminary Thoughts on Niyi Osundare’s
Poetry’, where he analyses the poetry of the Ikere-Ekiti-born scholar. But this
was after former Harvard University teacher Prof. Abiola Irele had also
commended the scholarship of Osundare, when he said, “We’re here to celebrate
one of our topnotch writers, whose poetry is very accessible. We hope this
would be continued as well as celebrate other writers. We hope we have
something like this annually in all the universities so we can meet more
regularly, as a sign that we’re creating, writing”.

“Scholarship on the poetry of Osundare continues to privilege the social
and political content of his work, in addition, of course, to his fascinating
appropriation of the techniques of indigenous Yoruba poetry,” Diala notes,
adding that Osundare’s poetry tackles social and political corruption, bad
governance, campaign for ameliorable conditions for ordinary Nigerians and his
concern for poetic art. Diala locates Osundare as The People’s Poet, with the
kind of poetry that is accessible while retaining poetic qualities and also
steeped in Yoruba folk tradition. He further comments, “The poet’s
recollections of the manifold oral resources of the Yoruba poetic heritage are
passionate, and its impact on his conception of poetry as both people-oriented
and performative is decisive”.

Counter-hegemonic discourse, Diala says, is another area where
Osundare’s poetry stands out when he said it contests the authority’s version
of events, especially in his collection Songs
of the Seasons, made up of poems from his newspaper column. In these poems,
Osundare confronts the powers-that-be, but he does this with an eye for the
timelessness of his poetic art.

Diala also situates Osundare in the realm of the humanistic in which he
bestrides the global scale with his poetry where Osundare himself also affirms,
“Humanity is one. My travels around the world have shown me we are more united
than politicians want us to believe”. Diala submits that although Osundare is
concerned about the social and political conditions of his country and deploys
his poetry to wrestle the political actors to do the needful, he’s still a
‘poet’, noting, “Osundare is essentially a poet,
rather than a political activist or even propagandist, wooing language for
memorable and compelling images of transformation. He scours varying realms of
experiences in search of antithetical images of birth, rebirth and regeneration,
on the one hand, and decay, dissolution and death, on the other. His arena is
infinitely larger than the Nigerian politics, even larger than the political”.

A discussant of Diala’s paper, Dr. NIran Malaolu said Osundare is one
academic who did not curry for political power through appointments by joining
the looters, but who remained committed to using his art for the benefit of the
masses in speaking truth to power, a course he said is “dangerous and
difficult, but obviously the path of honour”. Another discussant, Adagboyin, a
literary stylistician, argued that topicality and polemics in Osundare’s poetry
are often hyped more than the enchanting beauty in them. He said, “Topicality
does a great disservice to the beauty in Osundare’s poetry. There’s a conscious
simulation of the content with the stylistics. Osundare is a stylistician; as a
very conscious artist, he needs to pay attention to that aspect of beauty, the
unity of the content and the aesthetics. It’s as if the page is the canvas on
which Osundare paints his ideas”.

Olorunyomi also stated that Osundare’s use of the oral tradition in his
poetry is “not a cheap transfer of the oral to the written, but allowing all
senses to feel; it’s hyper-textual. The use of traditional motifs is turned into
something extraordinary, the familiar and the distant. In his counter-hegemonic
discourse, Osundare is critical and creative at the same time. But is the
counter-hegemonic era over? I’m not sure”.

In closing, Osundare read another poem from his City Without People collection in which he paid homage to all those
who reached out to him in fellowship and sympathy shortly after the Hurricane
Katrina tragedy and sent him relief materials like clothes and cash. He
particularly recalled late Chinua Achebe’s memorable words of comfort, “What
the storm took away friendship will restore”.

In a sense, The Niyi Osundare International Poetry Festival 2015 is part
continuation of that restoration borne of friendship! Already, keynote speaker,
Prof. Na’Allah has challenged the organisers to consider his institution, Kwara
State University, Malette as host of the festival next year. He said although
Ibadan was Osundare’s base, the acclaimed scholar was a citizen of the world
and everyone should be allowed to have a share of his scholarship which the
festival connoted.